Pieces
by CeeCeeSings
Summary: Post S4 Mid-Season Finale. Spoilers abound. Well...I'm back, for now. Everything I write comes back to Caryl, eventually, but this will likely include POVs other than theirs as well. All is scattered, and pieces are missing. Can the group ever be whole again? Can their hearts ever recover?
1. Scattered

**Lyrics used herein from "Farewell" © Bob Dylan.**

It's all over, now. Scattered, fallen apart.

It's all been wiped away, in an instant, like one of those crazy Buddhist sand paintings they would show on the History Channel, all of those monks slaving away on their knees, carefully drawing with tiny streams of colored grains, tracing improbably beautiful images on the bare ground. He remembers watching, unaware he was holding his breath, waiting for the lines to smear and the colors to blur. For someone to make a false, accidental move or an intentional, destructive one.

But one of the monks had explained: the images were intended to be temporary. The creators themselves would wash them away after the image was complete. _Nothing can last_, the man with the round, serene face had said to the camera, _Beauty is temporary. Nothing can last_. And then he had smiled, wiping away his work with one gnarled hand.

And now, pushing Beth's small form forward through the frayed barbed wire of the prison's gates, Daryl thinks the same thing: _Nuthin' can last. It's all over, hell to beauty_.

And like colored grains of sand, the former residents of the prison scatter and blur, smeared by away, as if they'd never been there.

ooooOOOOoooo

_Night. _

The dangerous orange light of the campfire pokes a glowing hole in the velvety, greenish blackness of the forest.

They have little choice: the rendezvous point with the bus is miles away on foot, in the opposite direction from which they fled. In the morning, he'll regroup, get a better sense of what to do. For now, he's just glad to be alive.

He skins a rabbit he caught, by sheer luck, right before sunset. He glances up at Beth. She punching holes in the top of a can of beans she had in the sack she grabbed on the way out of the prison yard. _Smart girl, _he muses, wondering if he would've had the same presence of mind. Especially considering she witnessed her father's slaughter mere minutes before.

She looks very young suddenly. All of the brittle pieces of armor she's built around herself, to survive, have fallen away. She looks more like the teenager he met nearly two years ago on Herschel's farm than the bristly and sometimes flippant young woman she'd become in the prison. Her eyes are full of her father, her arms vastly empty without Li'l Asskicker to fill them.

Her eyes catch him watching, large and luminous. He is uncomfortable with her beauty, with her youth, her newly apparent fragility. He has no words to help, he knows. He waits for her to speak. Women usually do first, he notices. _Not always, _he amends, pulling the skin carefully away from the rabbit's haunch, _with Carol, it was more like a toss-up, who'd speak first – _he clips the thought at the root, before it can grow and blossom into the deep regret and loneliness he knows it holds, like a poison flower.

"I'll take that," Beth finally says, gesturing to the rabbit, naked and red in his hand. Her voice is surprisingly clear and firm. He hands it over to her, stands, stretches. She skewers their dinner expertly, settling the animal over the flames.

She stands too, walks over, to be next to him. Neither of them wants this, to be here, but they are. Together. He is the adult, the _man_, goddammit, but he doesn't know what to offer her.

"Was thinkin'," she finally says. "Was thinkin'. Glad that bastard just took his head off. Daddy woulda wanted it that way. Clean. Final," her voice almost cracks on the last syllable, but she blinks, the flames of the fire capering in her eyes.

"Yer right," he chokes out. He thinks of Herschel, his calm, reassuring presence, seemingly everywhere in the prison, and something twists in his gut. He can't quite think of the man as dead and gone. "Your Pa was a tough old bastard."

She looks up at him, considers for a moment. "Guess he was. Never thought of him that way, but yer right." She sighs, says in a softer voice. "I'm gonna sing somethin' for him, real quietly, if ya don't mind?"

"Go on, then," he responds, folds his arms. To protect himself. As if that is possible.

Her bell-like voice bores into Daryl's guts as she begins.

"Oh it's fare thee well my darlin' true,  
I'm leavin' in the first hour of the morn.  
I'm bound off for the bay of Mexico  
Or maybe the coast of Californ.  
So it's fare thee well my own true love,  
We'll meet another day, another time.  
It ain't the leavin'  
That's a-grievin' me  
But my true love who's bound to stay behind…"

Her voice finally hitches, derails. Collapses. He does the only right thing to do, and puts his arms around her. She sags, sobbing, a little girl who just lost her Daddy, finally. He fights his own tears, and his own haunted thoughts, of everything else that's been lost, and might never be found.


	2. Rolling Stone

**A/N: So, I got a few messages from worried readers that this would be, at least temporarily, a Bethyl fanfic. It won't. For so many reasons, the primary one being it's totally OOC for both of them, especially Daryl. I try to use what the writers give us (slim pickins' sometimes) and what the actors give us (usually a little better, but not always.)**

The car eats up miles and miles of the near-empty road as the minutes blow by, and the breeze blowing through the driver's side window take some of her resentment and fear and bone-deep sorrow with it. She is glad. She can almost see them tumbling on the road in her rearview mirror, ghosts of the woman she was, the woman she tried so hard to be, soon-to-be-forgotten remnants, like the salty crust of tears drying on her cheeks.

She tries something, an experiment: she begins mentally tossing everything out, all of it, the past year and half: laughing with Sasha and Rick over lunch; ripping open a walker's stomach in a gruesome parody of an assisted birth; the hot, accusatory splash of Axel's blood covering her face; the zing of gunshots flying millimeters over her head; the sight of Carl, so gangly and earnest, catching her teaching knife class; singing an endless stream of Tom Waits songs with Beth and Maggie while they doggedly skinned small animals for dinner; the sun, unworried by human trials, rising in a riot of orange and pink over the prison yard. But there are things that will not be discarded so easily:

_The weight of Mika's words, telling her Lizzie is not weak. It is something else entirely._

_The weight of Lizzie's haunted, confused eyes, begging her through the glass barrier, wanting a mother, needing a mother, more than anything._

_The weight of Daryl's arm, slung around her shoulder._

These are all simply too heavy to toss aside. They are the things that will drag her down, these things she cannot shed.

These things she wants…no, no: these things she _needs_.

She thinks of Rick's fixed face, his fixed mind, his fixed heart. As angry and blindsided as she is by his decision, she cannot help but understand it: each person needs bedrock, so he or she doesn't just blow away in the winds of this wild, dangerous new world, something to cling to with bleeding fingers and bruised heart. Something to stay human. Rick cannot imagine a world without his children, without those other living beings that are, essentially, what keeps his heart beating, what keeps him sane in this insane existence.

So, in essence, by taking his paltry offerings and turning away, driving away, she allowed him his bedrock. By sacrificing her own. By sacrificing what her own heart wants and needs, to stay sane. As she mentally watches all of the things she's tossing aside, she realizes now what and who were luxuries and who are essential.

She cannot tumble down this road alone, a rolling stone. Something that has almost come loose in her reattaches, and she brakes the car to a sudden, shuddering stop. Considers her now-clear eyes in the rearview mirror. Goes to consult her watch, remembers with a rueful smile she passed it on to Rick, one part gift and one part recrimination.

She knows, now, she must go back, at least briefly, and claim what is hers. Life is nothing, otherwise.

"Yes," she says to herself. "Yes, of course." She puts the car in reverse, turns around on the dusty, deserted road, and heads back to get her family.


	3. Birds

Tyrese is tired. He's more tired than he's ever been in his life, the kind of exhaustion that goes beyond his aching muscles and creaking bones. Even deeper than his bruised and battered heart. He's tired in the deepest part of himself, the place he still thinks of as his soul. He feels as if he will always be tired.

But now he's got these kids. These kids who look up at him with their big, knowing eyes and their blood-smeared clothes and their long, shiny guns.

ooooOOOOoooo

They saved his life and then fled from him. Well, tried anyway. They hadn't gotten very far. He snagged them with shouted warnings, had literally snagged the smallest one – a boy named Cam – with the reach of one large hand.

The kid shrieked. Tyrese scooped him up, letting his gear scatter around him. "Hey, man, it's me, it's Tyrese, I'm ain't bit, I'm not a walker, you're okay, you're okay…" The kid's screams had turned to whimpers and he'd stopped fussing, collapsing against his shoulder.

The other three, all girls, those two sisters that Carol was carin' for and another one with a mop of brown hair whose name he couldn't remember, stared at him for a few moments, looking so much like skinny-necked, giant-eyed baby birds he almost expected them to start chirping. Instead the oldest, Lizzie, had flipped her braid over one slight shoulder, lifted her gun and before he could react, fired it again over his shoulder.

"Better start paying attention," she said solemnly, but then a small grin tugged the corner of her mouth upwards.

"A warnin' woulda been nice," he replied, looking at the pathetic remains of the walker she'd downed, setting Cam back on his feet.

"That's twice I saved your life now," she grinned ear to ear. Instinct made him return the smile, but there was something about this kid, her eyes, or somethin', that didn't quite jibe for him. It was like looking at someone's reflection in a mirror that was just slightly warped. You knew somethin' was wrong, but not quite what it was.

"Who's counting?" He responded, trying to shake the uneasy feeling off.

"What now?" Her sister asked.

"We get the hell outta Dodge," Tyrese replied, hurrying the kids away from their home, which was now being reclaimed by the fitful dead.

ooooOOOOoooo

And now, as night slow unfurls into morning, Tyrese is tired.

He stares down at the board floor of the hunter's cabin he knew, from forays into the woods for squirrels and other small game, was about five miles east of the prison. Just one small room, with little to recommend it other than the fact that its windows are closely boarded and its door is reinforced with iron beams.

The kids sleep in a tight little row on the wooden floor, huddled together in the chill of dawn. Tyrese watched over them all night, unwilling and unable to sleep, mourning the loss of what he now knows was just a pipe dream. There _is _no safety, no sweetness to be found, like that he found in Karen's long, dark curls and crooked smile. There is only survival. Love was a dream, something like the fevered hallucinations he saw his sister suffer through a few short days ago, when he thought he'd lose Sasha too…

"What are we going to do?"

He starts awake, unaware he drifted off. Jesus. Lizzie's face is less than a foot from his. "Jesus…" he mutters, rubbing his stubble.

"Did you sleep standing up the whole night?" She whispers. The other kids are still passed out.

"I didn't sleep at all," he replies, his heart still racing. Damn, the kid was stealthy.

"Well, duh, obviously you _did, _a little," the sass of a preteen, the eyes of an ancient stone idol.

"C'mon," he pushes her out the door, pulling his ax out, to be on the safe side. But morning woods are calm and clear and quiet. Despite his amorphous misgivings about this kid, he's going to need her help. She's the closest thing he has to a peer right now. And he really really doesn't want that to be the case for very long. They need to reconnect with the others as soon as possible.

She's looking quietly at him. He notices she already has her gun strapped across her slight middle. He can't remember if she ever even took it off. He fights the urge to knee in front of her. Begins speaking as if she's Sasha, or Glenn, or Maggie. An adult.

"Yeah, okay, so we gotta get ourselves some wheels," he says quietly. She nods in agreement. "And I know where there's a spare vehicle, back at the prison. But all them walkers, I don't wanna take the kids back there." He jerks his head towards the cabin. "Can you handle things here? Get 'em ready and meet me up at the road?" He points through the trees, where the local two-lane blacktop cuts through the woods about a mile north of the cabin.

"Sure," she nods, thinks. "When?"

He calculates. Without the kids and assuming he can run most of the way, he'll be back at the prison in under an hour. The car he has in mind is one he and Bob had been tinkering with for awhile and finally got running. He prays the other man didn't take it already, but it's better than trying random cars blindly along the road. "Two hours," he tells her, giving himself just a small amount of wiggle room. "Get 'em up, get 'em fed with whatever there is, and get 'em walking. Stay tucked away, by the shoulder of the road." He pauses, looks at her hair, which she has tied back with a flowered scarf. "Tie your scarf to a branch or a car antenna, so I know where you are."

"What if you aren't there?" Her voice is afraid, her small face inscrutable.

And now he does kneel down, because she _is _still a child, an odd one, but a kid nonetheless, and lies to her: "That's not an option. Be there. I will be." He grips her small shoulder briefly, stands, and takes off into the trees.

ooooOOOOOoooo

The dead really _have _taken over the prison, he notes with dismay, when he arrives at the destroyed front gate. The shambling dead and the fallen bodies that have been blasted through the brain, the truly dead. He knocks several of them out his way, swinging mindlessly with his ax, his body warm and limber from his run through the woods. He takes downs the ones he needs to, trying to draw as little attention to himself as possible.

Then he sees a prone form twenty feet in front of him, familiar only because of the wooden lower leg twisted through the side through the brown twill pants. There is a short-haired, scrawny walker slobbering over the severed head of the body, slightly to its left. Tyrese is surprised by the surge of anger that rises up through his haze of exhaustion. _No, goddammit, not Herschel, you geek, _and he rushes towards the feeding walker before he even knows his feet are moving. He knows the old man saved his sister's life the past week, and he'll be damned if one of these things is gonna snack on his brain.

And even after he goes back in his mind, and wonders, and tries to recreate those few seconds, over and over, he'll never know how he realized, before it was too late, that the form bent over Herschel's head wasn't eating, or groaning, or slavering – but weeping. Heartrending sobs that had no room for the walkers or a giant man wielding an ax.

But his brain, or something deep down, that place he calls his soul, must have translated for him. Because at the last moment, he lowered his ax and reached out a hand to grasp the thin shoulder. The person turned, tears pouring down her face.

Carol.


End file.
